Colonial Kinship

Winner of the 2021 Bandelier/Lavrin Book Prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies In Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay, historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of Guaraní--one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay--not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of Asunción, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the Guaraní logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to marry into Guaraní families in order to acquire indigenous tributaries, thereby becoming "brothers-in-law" (tovajá) to Guaraní chieftains. This pattern of interethnic exchange infused colonial relations and institutions with Guaraní social meanings and expectations of reciprocity that forever changed Spaniards, African slaves, and their descendants. Austin demonstrates that Guaraní of diverse social and political positions actively shaped colonial society along indigenous lines.

Empire, Kinship and Violence traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Elizabeth Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Elizabeth Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.

This volume explores the relationship between Thucydides and ancient Greek historiography, sociology, and culture. Drawing on modern anthropological enquiries on kinship and the sociology of ethnicity and emotions, it argues that inter-communal kinship has a far more pervasive importance in Thucydides than has so far been acknowledged.

This book combines insights from postcolonial, queer and diaspora studies to consider the meanings of kinship in contemporary black Atlantic fiction. Diasporic displacement generates new understandings and new narratives of kinship. An analysis of kinship is thus essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.

By following key families in Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Anglo-American societies from the Seven Years’ War through 1845, this study illustrates how kinship networks—forged out of natal, marital, or fictive kinship relationships—enabled and directed the actions of their members as they decided the futures of their nations. Natalie R. Inman focuses in particular on the Chickasaw Colbert family, the Anglo-American Donelson family, and the Cherokee families of Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter) and Major Ridge. Her research shows how kinship facilitated actions and goals for people in early America across cultures, even if the definitions and constructions of family were different in each society. To open new perspectives on intercultural relations in the colonial and early republic eras, Inman describes the formation and extension of these networks, their intersection with other types of personal and professional networks, their effect on crucial events, and their mutability over time. The Anglo-American patrilineal kinship system shaped patterns of descent, inheritance, and migration. The matrilineal native system was an avenue to political voice, connections between towns, and protection from enemies. In the volatile trans-Appalachian South, Inman shows, kinship networks helped to further political and economic agendas at both personal and national levels even through wars, revolutions, fiscal change, and removals. Comparative analysis of family case studies advances the historiography of early America by revealing connections between the social institution of family and national politics and economies. Beyond the British Atlantic world, these case studies can be compared to other colonial scenarios in which the cultures and families of Europeans collided with native peoples in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and other contexts.

The individual and cultural upheavals of early colonial New France were experienced differently by French explorers and settlers, and by Native traditionalists and Catholic converts. However, European invaders and indigenous people alike learned to negotiate the complexities of cross-cultural encounters by reimagining the meaning of kinship. Part micro-history, part biography, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France explores the lives of Etienne Brulé, Joseph Chihoatenhwa, Thérèse Oionhaton, and Marie Rollet Hébert as they created new religious orientations in order to survive the challenges of early seventeenth-century New France. Poirier examines how each successfully adapted their religious and cultural identities to their surroundings, enabling them to develop crucial relationships and build communities. Through the lens of these men and women, both Native and French, Poirier illuminates the historical process and powerfully illustrates the religious creativity inherent in relationship-building.

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model--in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission--structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Goldmark analyzes these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardized education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.